Your perception of time is impacting how you behave and hence your productivity.

How accurate is your perception of time?

Time perception (or the duration judgment) refers to the difference between external time and our internal grasp of it.

There are many free ways you can do to measure whether you know exactly how long 1 second or 1 minute feels like. Websites like arealme.com and lifepulse.it offer practices to help paint a picture on how accurate your time perception is.

It might seem trivial, but when built and continuously enhanced, this skill will support your time management even further. Some benefits of having sharp time perception skills include:

• If you have a good sense of how long a project will take, you can allocate your resources and schedule your deadlines accordingly.
• A great sense of time perception helps you avoid procrastination, rushing, or missing a deadline.
• Having a realistic sense of how much time has passed, you can adjust your pace and expectations accordingly.
• Not only perceiving duration, but perceiving time as scarce and rigid will make you more likely to focus on urgent tasks.
• Perceiving time as slow and long could lead to slower work with more creativity and relaxation.
• When you see time as meaningful and enjoyable, it will make you feel fulfilled with your activities and goals.

Find more discussions on how time perception affects human behavior in the LinkedIn Community post here .

Factors that affect how you perceive time

Experience might be the most obvious and biggest factor that determines how well you perceive and estimate time. Still, there are a wide variety of factors that could shape how one perceives time:

1. Physiological factorsAccording to recent research by scholars from the University of Newfoundland, the following factors determine how humans personally experience time:Age. Those who perceived themselves as younger than their chronological age perceived time as passing more quickly. This is due to changes in physical and mental health, mobility, independence and overall quality of life.Gender. A study in 2016, which examined 11 men and 11 women recreational runners, showed that women perceived time to be passing by more slowly than their male counterparts.Exercise. The type and intensity of exercise have been shown to have an impact on time perception. Higher intensity exercises seem to make time pass more slowly, which is seemingly a multiplicative effect.
2. Emotional factorsPsychology Today has outlined 5 common factors that influence how we perceive time, 3 of them include:Boredom. When waiting for an elevator, two minutes can seem to take too long. Boredom can alter the perception of time.Impulsivity. Impulsive individuals experience time differently. They have an altered sense of time, which explains their difficulties to delay gratification.Craving. Individuals in the state of craving, such as smokers who feel a strong urge to smoke, experience time differently—time seems to move more slowly.
3. Non-temporal task factorsResearch found that the same duration will be perceived differently depending on how it is delimited, giving rise to what have been called ‘temporal illusions’:Familiarity. A single presentation of a word affects its later perception, as revealed by longer duration judgments, and better temporal discrimination.Complexity. Between stimuli of different complexities, whatever their position, ones with the more complex movement were perceived as longer.Size. Larger stimuli are judged to last longer. This supports the idea that magnitudes in temporal and non-temporal dimensions are not independent.

Some factors might be more explicit than others, but whether subconsciously or not, they each impact the way we perceive time.

The 4 As to improve your time perception skills

It’s never too late to reset your internal clock and adjust it to your productivity needs. Here are the 4 steps you can take to achieve a more advanced time perception:

• AcknowledgeThe first step to fixing what’s broken is admitting that there’s a problem. Think of situations where you experienced "time loss". Which factors contribute the most to twists in your perception of time? Focus on the causes of distortion.
• AnalyzeSuccessful time management is also about accurately keeping track of passed time. You can use time-tracking apps like Toggl to log what you are doing. Observe patterns in collected data. Do you tend to work in large chunks of time?
• AlleviateWhen you get a clearer picture of the weakest points in your time perception, you can work on reducing their impact. You can try by literally placing a clock where you work, or using songs to estimate distance.
• AcceptNo matter how much you tweak your perception of time, there will always be some time lost. You will get stuck in traffic, people will be late hence delaying a meeting, etc. You’re not a robot who can always perform at the same speed.

Learn more of the fixes you can try to keep enhancing your perception of time here .

How did you do with the test? Do you have a better perception of time than you thought? Or worse?

As you move forward towards this week, try out some of the Time Perception tips above, and see if you become better and better at the test as you go.

See you again next Monday with more productivity tips!